Amazon Reportedly Wants NBA Playoff Games as Part of Rights Deal; Netflix Not Interested in Live Games After All
In an interview, Amazon’s sports chief Jay Marine called playoff rights an ‘important’ part of the company’s potential NBA bid.
Is a deal between the NBA and Amazon already a slam dunk? Nothing is set in stone yet, particularly as the league’s exclusive negotiating window with Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery for its next broadcast deal doesn’t even start until March. But once that window concludes other suitors will be able to join the fray, and Disney and WBD have both made it known they’re going to pursue smaller packages of NBA games when their current broadcast deal expires after the 2024-25 season.
- A new report indicates Amazon wants playoff rights in any package of games it gets from the NBA. Currently, all NBA playoff games are shown on ESPN or TNT.
- Another report states Netflix is interested in making a documentary about the NBA, but is not interested in showing live games.
- Amazon’s interest in the NBA shows why its now-canceled daily sports talk bloc was launched prematurely.
Will Prime Video Get NBA Playoff Games?
If the company gets its way, the answer to this question will be absolutely yes. Amazon’s Head of Global Sports Jay Marine spoke to John Ourand of Sports Business Journal and Andrew Marchand of the New York Post on their shared podcast recently, and said that Amazon viewed the acquisition of playoff rights as highly consequential in any potential agreement with the NBA.
“Would something like the playoffs be an important part of [our bid]? Yes, I think that’s fair to say,” Marine said during the conversation.
Amazon has not been shy in declaring its intentions to go after the NBA’s rights in 2025. It reportedly wants to make basketball streaming a weekly event in the style of “Thursday Night Football,” and has also stressed the importance of acquiring local as well as national rights to teams so that blackouts are not a problem for audiences.
Will Amazon actually get any NBA playoff games? It really depends on TNT and ESPN, who are currently responsible for airing the NBA postseason. As stated above, those channels get an exclusive negotiating window with the NBA next year, and while both want smaller game packages overall, it’s hard to see either giving up a meaningful portion of its playoff rights and sacrificing the ratings they bring in.
Another report from Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw is throwing cold water on the idea of Netflix hosting NBA games. Last week, a report circulated that Netflix was interested in bidding on rights to the league’s new in-season tournament, but Shaw says that while the streamer does want to create a documentary series about the league, it does not want to pursue any live games.
Sports Talk Follies
Going after a package of NBA rights that includes playoff games would indeed fulfill Marine's August promise that Amazon would be “aggressive” in pursuing live sports going forward. Still, it begs the question of why the company launched its 12-hour daily bloc of sports talk programming so prematurely.
“Sports Talk” first launched around a year ago, and featured daily sports roundups and talk shows free from some fairly big names, including Cari Champion. The biggest problem at the time seemed to be the fact that Amazon didn’t have that many sports to talk about, leaving its hosts the dilemma of having to talk about events that users couldn’t watch on Prime Video. “TNF” is a fantastic asset for Amazon, but one NFL game per week is hardly enough content to fill out 12 hours of sports talk with.
That’s likely why Amazon decided to end “Sports Talk” in late September. In the end, the lineup was always a bit of a cart-before-the-horse proposition, but Amazon’s active pursuit of the NBA only shines a spotlight on that issue. It never made much sense for the company to spin up 12 straight hours’ worth of analysis and highlights without having a requisite amount of sports for “Sports Talk” to break down.
Could fans see a return of some “Sports Talk” content in the future? It’s certainly possible, especially if Amazon does win a large package of NBA regular season and playoff games after 2025. But if it does it likely won’t be a 12-hour stretch of sports-dedicated shows, and Amazon will have to make sure it applies lessons from the failure of the first iteration of “Sports Talk” in any new sports radio ventures.
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 10,000+ movies, TV shows, and Prime Originals like “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “The Boys,” and more. Subscribers can also add third-party services like Max, Showtime, STARZ, and dozens more with Amazon Prime Video Channels. Prime Video also offers exclusive live access to NFL Thursday Night Football.